Mitt Romney has been walking a tricky line with his comments on Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting his campaign and running harsh negative ads against Newt Gingrich in Iowa. He has said that super PACs represent the breakdown of the campaign finance system, but he's also spoken at ROF fundraisers. He has claimed that he can't urge the super PAC to take down negative ads, because that would be a violation of non-coordination rules, but he has also defended negative advertising in general as a campaign tool.

My colleague Juana Summers tried to push Romney for a more coherent position during an avail in New Hampshire, with this result:

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Q: "Turning back to advertising and super PACs, you've spoken at fundraisers for the Restore Our Future group. How can you now say you have no responsibility for the ads that they're running in Iowa?"

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ROMNEY: "The law says that my campaign and I can not in any way coordinate with the activities of the super PAC. Under federal law, that's something we can't do. So the Supreme Court has laid out what the rules are. We can fundraise, encourage people to talk to the super PAC, I presume, I haven't done that. We can fundraise, that we did. The super PAC itself is under responsibility for managing its own affairs, and we may not communicate with them or tell them what to do or what not to do. So that's ad by ad, I think the term the Supreme Court used was we may not coordinate, and so our lawyers tell us what we can do and what we can't do. And that's true, by the way, for other campaigns, who likewise can't coordinate. I think that's the term that's used with the super PACs, so we follow the law as well as we can."

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Got that?

Muddling things further, here's what Romney said when he was asked about negative advertising and the holiday season: "I hope all the ads come down over the Christmas weekend. It's probably time that people would rather watch some football or watch some movies." That's a standard political line, but hard to see the difference between a comment like this, and saying — as Romney has declined to do — that he'd prefer to see independent groups supporting him stay positive.

Super PACs, by their very nature, allow candidates to benefit from outside spending and even participate in some finance-related activities, without being fully accountable for what the groups do. But Romney's comments have been more confusing than clarifying, as he tries to keep the high ground while benefiting from attack ads on the outside.